Design Brief: A Tower Defense (part 1)
Anyone who knows me knows I love Tower Defense games. It perfectly fits one of my favourite styles of play - Setting up an answer to a logical puzzle and then watching it play out.
Cause really, that's what a Tower Defense is.
Enemies comes in Point A, they're trying to get to Point B. You build Towers which may or may not affect the path they take in order to kill them before reaching Point B.
This is a logic puzzle. You have to pre-plan an effective countermeasure against what's coming, set it up then watch it play out.
I'm going to take a stab at designing one.
The Gameplay
This is a generic Tower Defense (TD) map. This is how it works.
So many waves of enemy troops start at point A and follow the Brown Path until they reach point B. For every enemy unit that reaches point B you lose a life, lose all your lives and it's game over. Enemy Units in Tower Defense games are typically called Creeps as they creep along the path or Mobs as they are just a big mob.
There are actually two kinds of Tower Defense, those where the enemy path is fixed and those where it is not. In the versions where the path is fixed, there are relatively few towers to choose from but the game mainly tests your mazing skill, your ability to create a long winding maze. The other with the path is fixed more tests your ability to place the right towers at the right location. This game will be the latter, fixed path, testing placement of towers. But on the upside, we have a lot more variation in towers than a mazing game.
Now the enemies have a fixed movement speed, so it takes them a fixed time to get to point B, this is how long you have for your towers to blast them into atoms.
You can build towers on any of the green buildable area. So no you cannot block the creeps in as you cannot build on the brown path.
The one other key to the game is upgrading towers. Make them shoot faster, harder and at longer ranges, maybe even add strange powers to them. The enemies have variation too, some move faster but are weaker, some move slower but are tougher, some regenerate, some have bursts of speed, some are immune to magical effects. It's anticipating these variations and having towers in place to handle them that makes a good player.
Now that I've given the general idea let's look at some of the towers.
Towers
I want us to have at least two sources of damage: Physical and Magical. I plan to have some creeps resistant (not immune) to each of those, forcing the player to vary their defenses and not focus on just one type. So with that let's look at some physical damage towers.
Arrow Tower: This is the most generic of generic towers. A guy inside with a bow shoots the creeps. It'll be great for the early waves as it's cheap and has reasonable damage and rate of fire.
Future upgrades could be a Sniper Tower, which has huge range and damage but a low rate of fire, a Rapid-Reload tower which has average damage and range, but very fast reloading or a multi-shot tower, which hits multiple creeps at the same time. Fire Arrows is also an option where the creeps take the damage of the area then burn for more damage over a few seconds.
Cannon Tower: This is the basic AOE tower. It is slower firing than the Arrow Tower and more expensive, but it deals more damage and its explosion hurts multiple creeps at once.
Future upgrades could be alternate shots, such as Grapeshot or Shrapnel, which will hit every creep in a cone from the tower or Carcass which lobs a sack filled with flaming poisonous materials. Whilst the shot itself won't do any damage, any creep which walks over the carcass will take poison or fire damage for a time. Another option could be a spiralling disc which bounces off a creep it hits to hit the next nearest creep, as the tower is upgraded the number of creeps the disc hits will increase.
I believe it's important that the higher levels of these towers be comparable in power to the magical towers. I've played many TDs where this wasn't the case so when the magical immune enemies came around you couldn't kill them as the physical towers were too weak in comparison to their magical counterparts.
Now the magical towers I want to build around the elements, as it's familiar to long term TD players and even to non-TD players you'll get the idea. There's too ways we can approach this, either all magical towers deal magical damage or all magical towers deal damage of their element, fire, water, ice etc. Having all towers deal their element is the most interesting and allows for some interesting combinations such as physical towers dealing elemental damage (flaming arrows anyone?) but this would require creeps with varying resistances to the elements and adds more complexity. For the sake of simplicity we'll keep the elemental towers dealing magical damage but add more interesting effects to them to make up for this.
Magic: This is the base magical tower which all magical towers are an upgrade from. It'll deal slightly more damage than the arrow tower but at a slightly slower rate so they're about even. The difference is that the damage is magical not physical, so it's good on physical resistant enemies and terrible on magical resistant.
Future upgrades are the elemental towers listed below.
Fire: Fire will initially shoot a red flaming beam that damages one creep for constant magical damage.
Future upgrades will take the fire tower down one of the two paths. Focus or AOE. Focus will enhance the tower's single creep damage, letting the flaming beam deal more damage and at higher levels enhance all damage that creep takes from other towers as their armour is melted away. The other choice is AOE, The tower forgoes its beam in favour of hitting all creeps in range simultaneously as it floods the area with lava. Each blast of the tower hurts all creeps nearby.
Ice: Ice will initially fire a block of ice which slows one creep that it hits.
Future upgrades will be either Ice Path or Ice Block. Ice Path will shoot the ice at a creep but instead of slowing it down will freeze the path beneath it, slowing it and all other creeps that walk over it for as long as it lasts. Ice Block will target only a single creep but will slow it down much more than the path allows. In essence you've got a trade off between raw slowing power or slowing multiple creeps. As there will be waves consisting of a single very powerful creep (a boss), there is use for both.
Lightning: Lightning will be a rapid fire tower, the highest rate of fire in the game.
Future upgrades will be either Shock Therapy or Chain Lightning. Shock Therapy will continue the high fire rate, but each shot will have a chance to stun the creep for less than a second, like 0.2s which doesn't sound like much but with the speed this tower fires at it's likely to paralyse the creep regularly. Chain Lightning will be a magical version of the Cannon's bouncy disc. The zap hits the first mob and then jumps to nearby mobs. Again there is a choice here between high single target damage or high multiple creep damage. Multiple Shock Therapy towers could potentially keep a boss pinned in place permanently, which is why some creeps will be immune to magical effects :D
Air: Air will fire just a blob of air at the target. It'll be more damaging as there's no special effect (yet)
Air only has one upgrade, Tower Link. Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSPQvezGq4c
One tower does just normal damage. Two towers linked does more than double damage. Three towers linked does more than triple. But only to a single mob. This is the ultimate single target damage tower, but it requires hefty setup and multiple towers before it's usable. this is why Air only has one upgrade, it needs no other function, also I expect players will love the Tower Link so much they won't use an alternate Air upgrade, cause that Air tower could've been another Tower Link!
There needs to be a method in place to stop this being horribly overpowered though. 7 or 8 of these linked would be unstoppable. A limit on the number of Air towers is possible but seems like a cheat to me, we want players to make choices, limiting the towers takes away that choice. Instead we'll give the Tower Link a low rate of fire, so low in fact that if the player builds majoritly Air Towers he won't be able to kill all the creeps coming in each wave.
Earth: Earth will deal no damage. Earth towers will boost the damage of all towers in range.
Future upgrades will be one of three types: Damage, Range and Rate of Fire. Whichever option is picked will be the only statistic the tower increases. It will increas nearby towers by a percantage not a fixed value, so a tower like the Sniper Tower, which already has a huge range will get more of a boost than a lower range tower. These bonuses do not apply to Earth Towers, so no boosting Earths range to cover the map for massive damage boosts ;)
Water: Water upon every shot, will give you some mana.
There is only one upgrade, which increase the amount of mana gained per shot.
What is mana you say? Well mana is what you'll use to cast spells. You see Tower Defenses can be very non-interactive at times. I've noticed it varies from game to game, but some you set up then go away as you need to do nothing else. This is boring, so I'll have the creeps eventually be stronger than the towers can handle, but you the player have spells at your disposal, AOE slow down, a meteor on one area, that sort of thing. These spells will use mana which recharges over time, but you can help it along by building water towers.
So far...
This is just the beginning of the potential of towers. What if we merged elements? Combine Fire and Water for Steam which AOes all mobs and increases all damage dealt to them? Combined Water and Earth for Nature, which poisons enemies? Combined Air and Earth for Sand? What if we added Light and Dark towers? Or merge 4 side by side towers into one huge Fortress tower? Or the sometimes used Gold Tower which gives you some gold for every hit and increases the gold gained if that tower gets the killing blow on a creep.
Many possibilities, so much room to explore and expand.
With that, I'll this for now. Next time I'll be looking at the various creeps and the abilities and effects they'll have, maybe even get to spells as well.
Part 2: skynes.livejournal.com/20840.html
Part 3: skynes.livejournal.com/21197.html
Cause really, that's what a Tower Defense is.
Enemies comes in Point A, they're trying to get to Point B. You build Towers which may or may not affect the path they take in order to kill them before reaching Point B.
This is a logic puzzle. You have to pre-plan an effective countermeasure against what's coming, set it up then watch it play out.
I'm going to take a stab at designing one.
The Gameplay
This is a generic Tower Defense (TD) map. This is how it works.
So many waves of enemy troops start at point A and follow the Brown Path until they reach point B. For every enemy unit that reaches point B you lose a life, lose all your lives and it's game over. Enemy Units in Tower Defense games are typically called Creeps as they creep along the path or Mobs as they are just a big mob.
There are actually two kinds of Tower Defense, those where the enemy path is fixed and those where it is not. In the versions where the path is fixed, there are relatively few towers to choose from but the game mainly tests your mazing skill, your ability to create a long winding maze. The other with the path is fixed more tests your ability to place the right towers at the right location. This game will be the latter, fixed path, testing placement of towers. But on the upside, we have a lot more variation in towers than a mazing game.
Now the enemies have a fixed movement speed, so it takes them a fixed time to get to point B, this is how long you have for your towers to blast them into atoms.
You can build towers on any of the green buildable area. So no you cannot block the creeps in as you cannot build on the brown path.
The one other key to the game is upgrading towers. Make them shoot faster, harder and at longer ranges, maybe even add strange powers to them. The enemies have variation too, some move faster but are weaker, some move slower but are tougher, some regenerate, some have bursts of speed, some are immune to magical effects. It's anticipating these variations and having towers in place to handle them that makes a good player.
Now that I've given the general idea let's look at some of the towers.
Towers
I want us to have at least two sources of damage: Physical and Magical. I plan to have some creeps resistant (not immune) to each of those, forcing the player to vary their defenses and not focus on just one type. So with that let's look at some physical damage towers.
Arrow Tower: This is the most generic of generic towers. A guy inside with a bow shoots the creeps. It'll be great for the early waves as it's cheap and has reasonable damage and rate of fire.
Future upgrades could be a Sniper Tower, which has huge range and damage but a low rate of fire, a Rapid-Reload tower which has average damage and range, but very fast reloading or a multi-shot tower, which hits multiple creeps at the same time. Fire Arrows is also an option where the creeps take the damage of the area then burn for more damage over a few seconds.
Cannon Tower: This is the basic AOE tower. It is slower firing than the Arrow Tower and more expensive, but it deals more damage and its explosion hurts multiple creeps at once.
Future upgrades could be alternate shots, such as Grapeshot or Shrapnel, which will hit every creep in a cone from the tower or Carcass which lobs a sack filled with flaming poisonous materials. Whilst the shot itself won't do any damage, any creep which walks over the carcass will take poison or fire damage for a time. Another option could be a spiralling disc which bounces off a creep it hits to hit the next nearest creep, as the tower is upgraded the number of creeps the disc hits will increase.
I believe it's important that the higher levels of these towers be comparable in power to the magical towers. I've played many TDs where this wasn't the case so when the magical immune enemies came around you couldn't kill them as the physical towers were too weak in comparison to their magical counterparts.
Now the magical towers I want to build around the elements, as it's familiar to long term TD players and even to non-TD players you'll get the idea. There's too ways we can approach this, either all magical towers deal magical damage or all magical towers deal damage of their element, fire, water, ice etc. Having all towers deal their element is the most interesting and allows for some interesting combinations such as physical towers dealing elemental damage (flaming arrows anyone?) but this would require creeps with varying resistances to the elements and adds more complexity. For the sake of simplicity we'll keep the elemental towers dealing magical damage but add more interesting effects to them to make up for this.
Magic: This is the base magical tower which all magical towers are an upgrade from. It'll deal slightly more damage than the arrow tower but at a slightly slower rate so they're about even. The difference is that the damage is magical not physical, so it's good on physical resistant enemies and terrible on magical resistant.
Future upgrades are the elemental towers listed below.
Fire: Fire will initially shoot a red flaming beam that damages one creep for constant magical damage.
Future upgrades will take the fire tower down one of the two paths. Focus or AOE. Focus will enhance the tower's single creep damage, letting the flaming beam deal more damage and at higher levels enhance all damage that creep takes from other towers as their armour is melted away. The other choice is AOE, The tower forgoes its beam in favour of hitting all creeps in range simultaneously as it floods the area with lava. Each blast of the tower hurts all creeps nearby.
Ice: Ice will initially fire a block of ice which slows one creep that it hits.
Future upgrades will be either Ice Path or Ice Block. Ice Path will shoot the ice at a creep but instead of slowing it down will freeze the path beneath it, slowing it and all other creeps that walk over it for as long as it lasts. Ice Block will target only a single creep but will slow it down much more than the path allows. In essence you've got a trade off between raw slowing power or slowing multiple creeps. As there will be waves consisting of a single very powerful creep (a boss), there is use for both.
Lightning: Lightning will be a rapid fire tower, the highest rate of fire in the game.
Future upgrades will be either Shock Therapy or Chain Lightning. Shock Therapy will continue the high fire rate, but each shot will have a chance to stun the creep for less than a second, like 0.2s which doesn't sound like much but with the speed this tower fires at it's likely to paralyse the creep regularly. Chain Lightning will be a magical version of the Cannon's bouncy disc. The zap hits the first mob and then jumps to nearby mobs. Again there is a choice here between high single target damage or high multiple creep damage. Multiple Shock Therapy towers could potentially keep a boss pinned in place permanently, which is why some creeps will be immune to magical effects :D
Air: Air will fire just a blob of air at the target. It'll be more damaging as there's no special effect (yet)
Air only has one upgrade, Tower Link. Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSPQvezGq4c
One tower does just normal damage. Two towers linked does more than double damage. Three towers linked does more than triple. But only to a single mob. This is the ultimate single target damage tower, but it requires hefty setup and multiple towers before it's usable. this is why Air only has one upgrade, it needs no other function, also I expect players will love the Tower Link so much they won't use an alternate Air upgrade, cause that Air tower could've been another Tower Link!
There needs to be a method in place to stop this being horribly overpowered though. 7 or 8 of these linked would be unstoppable. A limit on the number of Air towers is possible but seems like a cheat to me, we want players to make choices, limiting the towers takes away that choice. Instead we'll give the Tower Link a low rate of fire, so low in fact that if the player builds majoritly Air Towers he won't be able to kill all the creeps coming in each wave.
Earth: Earth will deal no damage. Earth towers will boost the damage of all towers in range.
Future upgrades will be one of three types: Damage, Range and Rate of Fire. Whichever option is picked will be the only statistic the tower increases. It will increas nearby towers by a percantage not a fixed value, so a tower like the Sniper Tower, which already has a huge range will get more of a boost than a lower range tower. These bonuses do not apply to Earth Towers, so no boosting Earths range to cover the map for massive damage boosts ;)
Water: Water upon every shot, will give you some mana.
There is only one upgrade, which increase the amount of mana gained per shot.
What is mana you say? Well mana is what you'll use to cast spells. You see Tower Defenses can be very non-interactive at times. I've noticed it varies from game to game, but some you set up then go away as you need to do nothing else. This is boring, so I'll have the creeps eventually be stronger than the towers can handle, but you the player have spells at your disposal, AOE slow down, a meteor on one area, that sort of thing. These spells will use mana which recharges over time, but you can help it along by building water towers.
So far...
This is just the beginning of the potential of towers. What if we merged elements? Combine Fire and Water for Steam which AOes all mobs and increases all damage dealt to them? Combined Water and Earth for Nature, which poisons enemies? Combined Air and Earth for Sand? What if we added Light and Dark towers? Or merge 4 side by side towers into one huge Fortress tower? Or the sometimes used Gold Tower which gives you some gold for every hit and increases the gold gained if that tower gets the killing blow on a creep.
Many possibilities, so much room to explore and expand.
With that, I'll this for now. Next time I'll be looking at the various creeps and the abilities and effects they'll have, maybe even get to spells as well.
Part 2: skynes.livejournal.com/20840.html
Part 3: skynes.livejournal.com/21197.html